Thoughts about life, the universe and everything.

WT&TT: Alert! Breach of copyright! (reblog)

Uh oh. Rosie Malezer has discovered something disturbing. In light of her discovery, she says, “To all of you who have put copyright works out there, whether as a PDF, ePub or through Amazon Kindle, I strongly recommend that you do a weekly search on Google and on YouTube for your name.”

Read more below. This is not on!

Rosie Malezer usually has a very important story to tell about being an author who is survivor of domestic violence who is blind and deaf. She is also an Indigenous Australian woman and currently an ex-pat. She has told – and continues to tell – her story through her writing in her books and on her blog. Please check her out. Her messages are sometimes hard, but necessary to hear. I’d recommend one of her latest posts especially to those in the health profession. Below are a collection of several posts from Rosie. She’s discovered something rather disturbing for authors and readers.

The “….” notate where there’s more of the blog post to read which I haven’t put up here, given I was putting several posts together. Read more by clicking on the linked title or date.

Authors beware. More and more, I have been finding companies who quite happily supply your copyright materials (books, music, comics) to their paid customers, even though they have no right to do so. In breaching copyright, these companies take away all of your income from hard-earned work by we artists, writers, musicians and pocket it themselves.

Some of the worst offenders are sites called BEST BOOK LIBRARY, BOOKS DEITY, eBOOKSLOVER, BINSEARCH.net and BOOK RIDDLE, which not only supply your works illegally to the public, but hide the work under a different author’s name.

….To all Kindle authors out there, please take the time to check your DRM settings, as two of my books (one not yet released, but with many pre-release sales pending) had the DRM changed to the dreaded second setting, allowing a free-for-all and costing me all income which could have been gained over the past six months. If you have fallen into the same trap, you will also have to unpublish your book and re-publish from scratch.

Recently, I blogged about the fact that many of my books were appearing “for free” on paid web sites in which the web site owner (and not the author) were profiting from the books. I listed a few examples so that authors could check that their own work had not been stolen, breaching the very copyright at the beginning of their book.

Again, many books (including my own) have been found which are not free-for-all and the authors are missing out on their payments. The first giveaway that this site was not honest was all the spelling errors, followed by the fact that so many of the books they are supplying are new release. Then the final piece of the puzzle that they are gimps comes from the fact that they were stocking my books, when I had never provided it to them to begin with!

If you are an author and you are followed by a Twitter user called “@epublibrary,” you might want to do yourself a favour and block them from your site immediately.

I urge you, readers, do not go to these sites. They steal from the writer, disguise themselves as honest sites, and ask you to spread the word and link to them all over the many social media sites online, encouraging you to help further empty the authors’ pockets. It’s unfair to anyone who writes for a living. Kindle books are inexpensive, do not harm the environment, and are provided to you with trust that you will not share the book illegally to others.

Last week, I inadvertently discovered how these sites are taking our “secured” work from Amazon Kindle and are turning them into free documents for distribution, and it has everything to do with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) setting with Kindle.